John Murrell

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

This full disclosure won’t take long. I own no individual stocks. I have some shares of Fidelity Magellan purchased back in the early Peter Lynch days, and while some technology stocks move in and out of that fund, I have no knowledge of or influence over those transactions. I have the smoldering remains of a small investment in a gold mining mutual fund, also purchased about 30 years ago, that I keep for sentimental reasons. I have a vested pension from my 30-odd years with Knight Ridder awaiting me. I know nothing about the day-to-day management of that money; I’m just hoping it’s still there when I need it.

I do no consulting and take no paid speaking engagements. Frankly, I barely leave the house. I do have a fondness for coffee mugs bearing the logos of obscure, failed tech firms, but I accept no products, discounts or gifts of value from companies covered by this site.

This site and our conferences are owned by Revere Digital. Revere has two minority investors: The NBCUniversal News Group, which is owned by Comcast; and the investment firm Windsor Media, owned by former Hollywood executive and Yahoo CEO Terry Semel.

In addition, Pinterest executive Joanne Bradford is an independent board member of Revere, for which she has received a small amount of stock in Revere that vests over a number of years.

My posts have total editorial independence from these investors and also Bradford, even when they touch on products and services these companies produce, compete with, or invest in. The same goes for all content on Re/code and at our conferences. No one in this group has influence on or access to the posts we publish. We will also add a direct link to this disclosure when we write directly about the companies.

Not counting his time as a paperboy (remember paperboys?), John Murrell has logged more than 40 years in print and digital journalism, making his way to the AllThingsD.com team in 2010 by way of the San Jose
Mercury News.

Starting in 1973, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Duluth News-Tribune until 1986, then moved to the Merc and spent the first few years as an editor on the National/Foreign Desk.

In 1991, having read enough science fiction to know where the information and communication business was headed, John joined the team that developed Mercury Center, served as the paper’s first online editor, and wrote a proto-blog as the site’s Minister of Information. In 2000, he slid over to the Merc’s tech news site, SiliconValley.com, as an editor, and later wrote the site’s “Good Morning Silicon Valley” blog and newsletter from 2007 to 2010.